Something else just struck me: the people who say this is completely out of character for Daenerys haven't been paying attention. Her potential ruthlessness and megalomania has been brewing for a long time. Her father was a psychopath too. I just can't see how people missed it.

Also, GoT continues to buck trends by making the most heroic characters fuck up massively. Like Dredd in both Sin City and Day of Chaos, they've made a hames of it despite their best efforts and as a result caused thousands to die. You didn't see that kind of thing on Lord of the Rings.

Logged

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”

Something else just struck me: the people who say this is completely out of character for Daenerys haven't been paying attention. Her potential ruthlessness and megalomania has been brewing for a long time. Her father was a psychopath too. I just can't see how people missed it.

Because we do not want to see this "pretty face" girl being the "baddie". We all shouted and routed for her in season 1. As you said this was already present in previous seasons

Tyrion, Varys and Jon Snow had already talked her out of using the dragons on King's Landing on two previous occcassions in series 7, so it was hardly out of the question that they would need to do it a third time, and that they might fail.

Well, I certainly wasn't expecting it all to turn out to be Bran's dying dream as he lay at the bottom of the tower from episode 1, but here we are. More audacious than Bobby Ewing in the shower, that's for sure.

On the plus side, thank fuck that's over because it was like being gradually waterboarded episode by episode. We got a Scooby Doo mixed with a Return of the King and some Marvel sequel expanding hinting style ending. Who couldn't be happy with that?

Something else just struck me: the people who say this is completely out of character for Daenerys haven't been paying attention. Her potential ruthlessness and megalomania has been brewing for a long time. Her father was a psychopath too. I just can't see how people missed it.

Can you really not see how there's a fairly sizable logical jump to go from 'potential ruthlessness' to slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children? Its the extreme level of her actions that people have taken issue with, apparently including the actor who plays the character. As for the Mad King, I guess my interpretation is that during his reign he had suffered a long, slow descent into paranoid schizophrenia and wasn't just 'genetically evil' because he was a Targaryen.

As for the finale, It was about as good as I could have hoped given how much I disliked the general direction of the season as a whole. It had some truly outstanding visuals (drogon emerging from the snow, Dany framed by the dragon wings) and it's nice that they at least acknowledged the existence of other houses like the Arryns, Tullys and Martells - one of my main complaints the last season or two is how empty the world has felt relative to the early seasons. I was almost certain we'd never get any more scenes featuring non Stark or Targaryen characters.

I found the first half hour completely devoid of tension given that there was never any doubt (to me, at least) as to which way Jon would go re: Dany. However Jon subsequently going into exile beyond the wall was a great ending for him - a neat inversion of the opening scene of the pilot - life going out into the cold vs death coming out of it. It felt logical, poetic and bittersweet in a way that a lot of the other resolutions didn't.